dkirschner's Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath (PC)

[August 8, 2013 11:19:07 AM]

Played about 3 hours over the last few days and this one isn't gelling. Reminds me a bit of Beyond Good & Evil, in which I quit partly because I didn't like the controls or the camera. This camera is often a little wonky, and I really dislike when the Stranger runs, and then runs into an object, because he stops and can't move for just long enough for it to be annoying. I just found a number of things that bugged me. You can't heal when you're taking damage, which in my opinion forced a stealthier approach. Problem is I didn't want to take a stealthier approach because that means strategically using different ammo types. The ammo types are fine in and of themselves, but switching ammo is a pain, and the ammo hunting, while innovative, I disliked. Therefore, I don't like to use a lot of ammo. Not liking to use ammo in a platformer/FPS is a death sentence.

I guess I should say why I do think the ammo system is sorta neat. In the Oddworld world, or this game at least (this was my first Oddworld game), your ammunition is live animals that you have to hunt. They are wacky, like bats that explode like grenades, bees that fire like machine gun bullets, little furball things that act like mines, some electricity bug that stuns enemies and triggers electronic locks and things in the world, and so on. I think the hunting ammo would be more enjoyable if you actually had to think about hunting it and do more than shoot it with the electricity bug. You just shoot it, then walk over it. As it is, I think it just adds an unnecessary step to what would otherwise be...walking over ammo pickups like in every other game. But, if they fleshed it out, like made you actually track and hunt creatures, that might be more interesting.

You can load two ammo types at the same time, one for left click and one for right click. There are like 9 ammo types, so any time you want to switch you have to hit up/down arrows, cycle to the one you want, and push left/right to assign it to the left/right mouse buttons. Since you want to change up ammo types strategically for different situations and enemies, a lot of time is spent cycling through that ammo menu. I really didn't like it either. I think you should have been able to load more types, or switch between them easier. I mean this game was ported to PC. It should be using 1,2,3,4,etc. hotkeys to switch weapons.